Windows 8 is now less than two months away from being commercially released and we have already seen a rise in the number of apps that early users of the RTM version can download from the Windows Store.

Developers who are working on apps for the "Modern" (formerly Metro) version of Windows 8 should try to test them out before submitting them to the Windows Store (obviously). In a new post on the official Windows 8 developer blog, Microsoft offers some advice on how to automate that testing process for apps.

The highly technical blog post goes over how developers should use a test PC to run their app with Visual Studio being the preferred testing tool. Microsoft goes over this procedure step by step.The next part goes over how developers can automate the activation of their app via the IApplicationActivationManager interface, which is found in the Windows SDK.

Next comes the part where developers can automate the testing of the core functionality of their Windows 8 app by unit testing and UI automation. Finally, the blog goes over how software creators can automate the lifecyle state and the uninstall portion of their app; Microsoft offers a lot of example code for these procedures in the post.